Dome, one of Japan's most renowned race car builders, is a company that's synonymous with high-quality and innovation. During a comprehensive tour of Dome, we saw first hand some of their latest projects.
Dome, situated in Shiga Prefecture less than an hour south from Nagoya, has been around for 24 years. Minoru Hayashi, founder and president, built his first race car over 36 years ago and turned his passion into a successful business. Styling, engineering designs, prototyping, testing, creating and assembling is all taken care of under one roof. In 2000 wind tunnel testing was added to this long list as the "Dome Tunnel" was built and is one of the most-used facilities in Japan. In fact during our tour, a Japanese car manufacturer was testing a soon-to-be-released sports car. Their wind tunnel is so popular that they rarely get a chance to use it, because it's booked most of the year!
In 2001 Dome Carbon Magic was set up, the side of operations which now takes up the majority of work for the company. Carbon fiber is big business in motorsports and Dome is the leader in Japan. We were walked through the various steps of carbon-fiber parts production. First up, the engineers in the CAD office take care of the design process using CATIA V5, state- of-the-art software. Here the molds for the carbon parts need to be designed and then cut out by huge modeling machines. Our guide explained that the molds are one of the reasons carbon-fiber production is so expensive especially since they begin to deteriorate after being used 40 times. Every time a mold has to be reused it requires a thorough cleaning and scraping to ensure that it has a smooth surface, a process that takes many man-hours.
The next step is completed in the two large lay-up rooms. Here skilled craftsmen meticulously lay down the carbon fabrics into the molds and start adding the resins that will help to shape the carbon around every nook and cranny of the molds. Carbon-fiber layers and the actual angles they are laid upon each other varies to give more or less strength, depending on the part being made. Dome takes care of building the F3 monocoque chassis, which requires an enormous amount of work as they need to absorb an impressive amount of force in high-speed impacts.